# Time keeps on tickin... tickin... tickin...

As time keeps on tickin' into the future, I keep avoiding what I /should/ be
doing in favor of survival and maintaining a veneer of sanity.  Unfortunately
my Yardstick of Sanity measures differently than other peoples, so I shall
relay to you what has been distracting me so verily.

## Roguelikes

I'm working on converting an old text-based game into a rogue, so I've been
trying to study up on roguelikes (and get past the mines in nethack,
apparently) - I've got a short proof-of-concept/robot-finds-kitten-clone (which
at the time of writing doesn't change levels appropriately) - but it's made
using [rot-js][4] and you can play it over on
[http://tilde.town/~kirch/roog.html][5]

## The Phenomenon of Interpretation

Matters not what word brain logic language for brain grok language. No
understand? maybe. maybe not. Brain no logic, brain interpret. Brain invent
sense where nonsense. Be looking [Aphasia][1], see doctors help. Imagine bad
time when no doctors help, patients hurt.  This too:

> Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr
> the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and
> lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can
> sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter
> by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Perception dictates reality - logophilia - oulipo - interpretation -
Meta-understanding. Nothing matters. Just try.

## Jeopardy (and Lurch, in general)

I've been playing with the pinhook framework, and trying to do some NLP with the jeopardy function (so it follows the rules of answers instead of just fuzzy-matching from the user's answer to the supplied one) - but I don't wanna waste system resources to provide accuracy, and people in the channel demand more accuracy and more leniency at the same time (because of hard problems in AI/understanding that I don't wanna resolve for a fun lil' hack) - anywho, [Lurch's source is available on tildegit][6]

##  The Dead "Darkweb" & More

The web used to be mostly dark - [BBSes][2] where you needed to know the phone
number (And might find other BBSes to find more phone numbers) to dial in to
get files, information, free information - for the price of discovery and
long-distance service. Soon this was replaced with newsgroups & gopherholes
with better discovery methods. Then the world-wide-web hit, with school
computers, pubnix and geocities, all sorts of ways to create your own sites,
and web directories and search engines A lot of this is no longer on the web,
but a lot has been saved by [The Internet Archive][3] - even things that didn't
necessarily get a nice front-page link from their host. There's no way to know
how much was lost, but I'm glad we have archive.org.

## Community Headaches

Blinkenshell, man - what is UP with people thinking they own blinkenshell and
can terrorize the community they're supposed to belong to? (Or, claim to belong
to and demand co-equal treatment to people who actually follow the rules) I
don't wanna play bad irCop, I just want people to climb out of their own anus
and be nice to eachother - if it were my server the banhammer might come down a
bit harder/faster, but I'm just trying to help build a community - why is that
so hard?







[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia
[2]: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
[3]: https://archive.org
[4]: http://ondras.github.io/rot.js/hp/
[5]: http://tilde.town/~kirch/roog.html
[6]: https://tildegit.org/kirch/Lurch


tags: update, aphasia, wayback, gopher, bots, moderation, archives